Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Those bags of beans at the store have been eyeballin' me for awhile now and last week I succumbed to the pressure. Bean pressure. Beans are a relentless force that will not deny or avow their greatness, even facing McNulty and Bunk in room 5. However, some beans are cocky and will tell you how great they are, some many times over, like in a stew that you can keep in the fridge for a week or so. These were those beans. Fortunately enough, mine didn't last a whole week. I had visitors (that will be receiving my Atmos bill in the mail shortly) in from sunny California this past week. After a long couple of days on the road, they needed a hearty handshake, laurel and a good meal to fight off Winter Blast 2009, the Second Coming. As a sidebar, I had the immense pleasure of seeing M. Ward at the Horchow Auditorium in the Dallas Museum of Arts on Sunday. He played this and it was fantastic. If you get to see Matt this week at SXSW, do it.

Beans soaking overnight (24 hours is best) - 2 quarts of water

Beans pre-rinse

You can see here that I rinsed them because this is a picture of a strainer (is that what you call it). After rinsing, add beans back to washed out (no soap) pot with 2 new quarts of water.

Cubed up some Earl Campbell hot link (singular, not the kind you buy 6 in a packet but those will work too. If you aren't a master stewer.)**

Add sausage to a boiling pot of beans and turn to medium until you have a good simmer goin. A good simmer is 2 or 4 columns of little bubbles coming up from the bottom.

Other stuff to add (its on the back, but I freelanced a little and threw in some piquins, jalapeno's and smoked paprika.)

After a good two hours (you can do 3 if you want) add the chopped ingredients and squeeze the lemon in. Salt and pepper accordingly. I used and have almost used up my peppercorns and colored sea salt. A tablespoon of each should suffice.

Add in a can of stewed tomatoes when adding the rest of the stuff too. You can stew your own if you want, but I didn't.

Once all of the ingredients are in the pot, let them simmer for another hour. I brought the heat up to a near boil because it was still kind of watery. I wanted more of a stew, so it reduced down nicely.

Moral of the story, took about 3.5 hours to make and was quite delicious. Made about 12 bowls of stew and cost about $10 American since water is cheap. Since it's SXSW week, here are some bands we think you should check out:

i dont think you can buy "uncooked" sausage. my suggestion is to go to your local butcher and ask him for some links. as far as i know, sausage is almost always precooked. that said, you can throw any kind of sausage in the smoker and it will cook and turn out great.

but go to the butcher. here are some links to butchers in the major metropolitan areas in Texas.